Monday, 5 December 2016

NOIR CANADIANA

Christmas Shopping

Even when you love your work you need a
break sometimes. I’d been on hiatus, weary of the calculated vengeance I’d so
casually inflicted. Death has a smell and it was starting to stink. My name is
Danger, Geoff Danger. I can be your staunchest ally or a relentless nemesis;
it’s up to you: your morals, your ethics. I’m a knight whose armour is polished
with blood and cynicism. The lustre’s dulled.

When my bosomy blonde moll Ann Fatale asked
me to go to a suburban mall with her I said okay. Downtown streets after
midnight are my usual prowl, but I was bored. So I backed the black winged,
chrome bumpered Cadillac out of the driveway and drove her to the marketplace.
I’d planned to sit in the car smoking and sipping hootch, listening to hard bop
on the eight-track. Ann whispered breathily that maybe I could buy her a
Christmas gift this year, just this once. Well, I’d given her my world and
everything in it but you can’t argue with a fine looking broad whose gams are
longer than ‘War and Peace.’ She said there were two stores that purveyed
dainty unmentionables and that I was overly familiar with her intimate
measurements anyway. How hard could it be?

I parked near an entrance. Ann and I agreed
to split up and rendezvous again in one hour. I went into the lingerie shop and
bought what I thought would look good hanging off a bedpost or piled on the
floor, which was how I came to be walking through the concourse carrying two
pink paper bags with four-inch gussets. A too pretty young man leaned over the
counter of a kiosk and tried to slip me a packet of something. It looked like a
French tickler. I brushed it aside. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said in a faux
Continental accent, Suisse with a lisp, ‘what do you use to wash your face?’

‘Irish whisky,’ I grunted. I tried to turn
away, intent on getting Ann’s gifts into the trunk of the Cadillac.

Precious reached out and stroked my cheek.
‘Do you exfoliate?’

I put my bags down and grabbed him by the
throat. ‘You little piece of Eurotrash,’ I hissed, ‘do you bleed? Do you feel
pain?’ I broke his perfect nose, cleanly. His blood flowed Santa Claus suit
red. I could smell its coppery scent.

Back in the parking lot I sat behind the
wheel smoking and drinking. I soon tired of the company. There was time to kill
before meeting Ann Fatale and I knew she’d be late. I decided to go back into
the mall and see if I could find a record shop. I did.

The jazz section was pathetically small. I
poked through it and stopped to examine a re-mastered version of Horace
Silver’s Doin’ the Thing – at the Village
Gate on compact disc. A clerk about a third of my age with only half his
head shaven and sporting black nail polish asked me if he could help me. I
ignored him. ‘That is a remarkable album,’ he said.

‘I have the vinyl,’ I grunted.

‘Well then, sir,’ he said, ‘this won’t be a
worthy upgrade. I think some of the rawness is missing. But if you like that
raw style…’ He circumspectedly directed me over to the blues. ‘A different
idiom, I know, but I think you’d really enjoy this.’ He handed me an album by
R.L. Burnside called A Ass Pocket of
Whiskey. The cover was a caricature, cartoony.

I studied it. I studied the sales guy. I
admire people who are good at what they do no matter what that may be provided
it’s legal and above board. I grunted, ‘You’re all right, kid.’ He wished me a
Merry Christmas and was there something else I was looking for? I said no and
took the disc to the cash.

I was waiting when my doll arrived late in
a fluster amid a flurry of bags. More bags than an old folks’ home. ‘I kept you
waiting,’ she sighed huskily. ‘I was a bad, bad girl. I did some impulse
shopping.’ I grunted. ‘It was the strangest thing,’ Ann went on, ‘there was a
pop-up store down one of the concourses manned by such a gorgeous young man.’
Ann glanced at me, ‘But not my type, big man. Anyway, somebody had punched him
in the face.’ I grunted and peered down at my shoes, wanting another cigarette.
‘I felt so sorry for him. I dropped two century notes on skincare products.’

‘Oh,’ was all I said.

‘Can you imagine?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘Did you get all your shopping done, baby?’

‘I did. I did. I even bought us some new
music to listen to, blues.’

‘Oh! Why don’t we get home, pour a
drinky-poo and listen to it? And you can watch me exfoliate my Brazilian.’